I have already addressed that quote from Ignatius. It is clearly aimed at Docetism. But to Carrier, the fact that it disagrees with his original claim cannot possibly mean that his original claim was wrong. It must mean that there was this conspiracy to change the meaning of Paul’s original intent.
I have already referenced the strong cautions against Docetism in the Epistles of John from the same era as Ignatius. This was a Gnostic idea. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus described the beliefs of Docetism in this way.
Without Jesus being a man, the crucifixion and death cannot be an atoning sacrifice. And the resurrection of a spirit has no bearing on a future human resurrection. These ideas lie at the heart of mainstream Christianity and come straight from Paul. That is why Ignatius and Irenaeus are so vocal against Docetism.
Carrier is using Ignatius to show there were other groups of Christians who did not believe the sories were literal but were allegory. So? :
"So not only is this “Ignatius” insisting the Gospels are relating historical facts, but he is declaring that any Christians who say otherwise are to be outright shunned. Which does mean there
were Christians saying otherwise. But it also quite decisively proves that this
other strain of Christianity—which we might call Ignatian, and which happens to be the one that in a couple of centuries would gain absolute political power over the whole of the West and control nearly all document preservation for a thousand years, eventually becoming today’s plethora of Christendom—was adamantly
literalist. They were shunning, expelling, damning any fellow Christians who dare suggest the Gospels are but allegories and not to be taken as historically true."
As I have shown, Carrier’s interpretation of Romans 1:3 is incorrect in terms of the word used – not ‘made’ but ‘became’, the Greek grammar – an active voice as suits ‘became’ when ‘made; would require-a passive voice, the context of the expectation of the audience – that the messiah would come from the House of David, and even the sense of the very next verse –
Paul does not use the word "for being born" where he does in Romans 9:11. You have not debunked Carries point at all.
What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3? • Richard Carrier
Carrier also talks about some translators ‘interpreting’ the words to mean something else, instead of translating them literally. But ‘became’ IS the literal translation, as Carrier already admitted. Is Carrier criticizing the KJV which says ‘made’? What exactly is Carrier saying here? That the KJV is interpreting the word incorrectly? So it does not mean ‘made’ after all?
But Carrier insists that Paul still meant ‘made’ because wherever he uses the word it must mean that. But as I have shown – and still have not gotten any counter-argument other than quoting Carrier – it very clearly does NOT mean ‘made’ anywhere else in Paul. It really does mean ‘became’.
"Made" "become" the seed is exactly what Carrier is saying. The language doesn't allow us to be 100% sure.
"We cannot answer the question with the data available whether Paul meant “sperm” (i.e. seed)
allegorically (as he does mean elsewhere when he speaks of seeds and births, such as of Gentiles
becoming the seed of Abraham by God’s declaration), or
literally (God manufacturing a body for Jesus from the actual sperm of David), or
figuratively (as a claim of biological descent—-even though Paul’s vocabulary does not match such an assertion, but that of direct manufacture). At best it’s equal odds. We can’t tell."
What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3? • Richard Carrier
Give an example of a savior god who died and rose in the celestial realm. With links to supporting documentation that (a) the god in question is a savior god and (b) that the death and resurrection took place in the celestial realm. I
Mystery religion - outsiders were told of a historical resurrection, members were revealed the mysteries, one being the event took place in the heavens.:
"Not only does Plutarch
say Osiris
returned to life and was
recreated, exact terms for resurrection (
anabiôsis and
paliggenesia:
On Isis and Osiris 35; see my discussion in
The Empty Tomb, pp. 154-55), and also describe his
physically returning to earth after his death (Plutarch,
On Isis and Osiris 19), but the physical resurrection of Osiris’s corpse is
explicitly described in pre-Christian
pyramid inscriptions!...
Plutarch goes on to explicitly state that this resurrection on earth (set in actual earth history) in the same body he died in (reassembled and restored to life) was the
popular belief, promoted in allegorical tales by the priesthood—as was also the god’s
later descent to rule Hades. But the secret “true” belief taught among the initiated priesthood was that Osiris becomes incarnate, dies, and rises back to life every year in a secret cosmic battle in the sublunar heavens."
Dying-and-Rising Gods: It's Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. • Richard Carrier
In any case, I have argued that the earliest Jesus followers apparently did not care for Paul’s ideas about the crucifixion being any kind of sacrifice or the resurrection being real or Jesus being a pre-existent divine entity. Which removes any mythological references from contention as origins of a mythical Jesus. Rather the belief in the existence of Jesus before all of that points toward a historic Jesus.
We know little about early Jesus followers. We do know dying/rising savior demigods were the rage, the Persians had one and the OT had been radically updated by the Persian ideas during the occupation which included prophecies of a Jewish version of one of these saviors who would permanently forgive sins (no more temple or temple sacrifices) and get followers into the afterlife.
We also know early Christianity was split among many factions each having very different ideas including radically different "Gnostic" groups.
Thinking that you have heard about some followers who had an idea about the sacrifice which then removes mythicism is absurd.
QUOTE="Miken, post: 6907841, member: 70034"]
Of course, we can tell what Paul meant.
If we leave out 2 Samuel 7:12 and Romans 1:3, which Carrier claims mean something else. We have only 8 instances in the entire Bible where the word seed means sperm. And those 8 instances, 4 are about the necessary purification rituals after ejaculation (did dead David perform those?) and 4 are about the evils of screwing around with the wrong women (not a very good image for what Carrier claims Paul means). All of the other uses of the word are very clearly about plant seeds or descendants.[/QUOTE]
Yeah but Carriers argument uses 2 Samuel7:12 :
"
- It is an indisputable fact that Nathan’s prophecy of the messiah literally declared that God said to David that, upon his death, “I shall raise your sperm after you, who will come out of your belly” (2 Samuel 7:12) and that seed will sit upon an eternal throne (7:13).
- It is an indisputable fact that Nathan’s prophecy was proved false: the throne of David’s progeny was not eternal; when Christianity began, Davidic kings had not ruled Judea for centuries.
- It is an indisputable fact that when faced with a falsified prophecy, Jews almost always reinterpreted that prophecy in a way that rescued it from being false.
- It is an indisputable fact that the easiest way to rescue Nathan’s prophecy from being false is to read Nathan’s prophecy literally and not figuratively as originally intended: as the messiah being made directly from David’s seed and then ruling forever, thus establishing direct continuity and thus, one could then say, an eternal throne did come directly from David.
Put all this together and there is no reason to believe Paul meant Romans 1:3 any other way than the only way that rescues Nathan’s messianic prophecy from being false. And that prophecy would be false if it were taken to mean the seed of a continuous line of sitting kings.
So Paul cannot have believed it meant that. And Paul’s choice of vocabulary in linking this prophecy to Jesus, based on what we can show was Paul’s own peculiar idiom everywhere else regarding the difference between manufactured and birthed bodies,
and his statement in Philippians which confirms he believed Jesus had a body made for him that Jesus then merely occupied, confirms this. No evidence in Paul confirms any other reading.
It’s also a fact that:
- The Gospels of Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as not descended from the seed of David but directly manufactured by God (this time in the womb of Mary). Though they both give a Davidic genealogy for Joseph, they both explicitly say Jesus was not born of the seed of Joseph.
- Therefore even the authors of the Gospels believed either that Jesus’s body was manufactured by God directly out of the seed of David or the “seed of David” prophecy was only meant allegorically. They cannot have understood it figuratively (as meaning biological descent), because they explicitly exclude that in their chosen description of Jesus’s origins.
There is no indication that the missionaries that preceded Paul had any a belief in a demigod. Paul uses the term of Son of God in the sense Philo uses the term, as a pre-existent, yet does not seem to be the original sense of the term. Mark plainly has early traditions at his disposal not from the Pauline tradition. In his trial scene Mark has the high priest get Jesus to claim to be the messiah and Son of God (actually Son of the Blessed One as one would a high priest to say it) Jesus then refers to the supernatural Son of Man in the third person.
What missionaries exactly and this is definitely more speculation.
Doubtful that Jesus was an Essene. Most Jews were just Jews. The Sadducees and the Pharisees were like elite clubs with specific membership requirements. Josephus estimated the number of Pharisees at 6000. Essenes kept out of public life, living communal lives either within cities or in closed communities in the countryside. Keeping out of public life certainly does not describe the Jesus we see in the Gospels.
In the gospels there are Sadducees and Pharisees and no Essenes. So it's likely that Mark/Jesus is the Essene point of view. Jesus was t an Essene, he is a character in a story. In real life there would have been many people representing the Essene but in a story it's represented by one character.
". Obviously, Pilate did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah nor as being a literal "king of the Jews".